John Dollard Research Files for Fear and Courage under Battle Conditions

John Dollard (1900-1980) was a psychologist and social scientist who studied race relations in America. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1931 and in 1932 was appointed Research Associate in Social Anthropology at Yale University's Institute of Human Relations. From 1942 to 1945 Dollard served as Expert Consultant to the Morale Services Division of the United States Department of War. Beginning in 1941 he and Neal E. Miller, Research Associate in Psychology at the Institute, undertook a study of fear and morale in modern combat conditions. When Miller enlisted soon after Pearl Harbor, John Dollard completed the study, working with Dr. Donald Harrison of the Institute, and with considerable assistance from the Irving Fajans, Jack Bzoje and other members of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Lincoln veteran John V. Murra, then a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago and later an anthropologist, acted as a paid project assistant. Murra helped with the distribution and collection of project materials, and travelled to Detroit and other cities to secure cooperation from veterans.

As a preliminary to designing the study's questionnaire some interviews with veterans were conducted by project staff. The 44-page questionnaire was then distributed American volunteers who had served under fire in the Spanish Civil War. Three hundred Lincoln Brigade veterans returned the lengthy questionnaire. With the aid of a Rockefeller Foundation grant Dollard and his team summarized their findings in a report entitled Fear and Courage under Battle Conditions (1943), a statistical analysis of the veterans' replies. The report was published as Fear in Battle (Washington: The Infantry Journal, 1944). In 1952 Dollard became a professor in Yale University's Department of Psychology and in 1969 he retired with the title professor emeritus.